What do Albania, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru and Palau have in common with the United States? They were the only countries that supported the US when the United Nations General Assembly voted this month on a Serbian-drafted resolution to seek an opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence in February.

Even though the court’s ruling will have no legal force, Serbia interpreted the UN vote as a diplomatic triumph. Seventy-seven countries, including Serbia itself, backed the resolution. Not one of Washington’s Nato allies supported the US. Seventy-four countries abstained.

The vote was not an unqualified success for Serbia, however. Serbia won support from heavyweights such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa, but it found itself in disagreement with most members of the European Union - the very institution it hopes to join one day.  

Even so, the vote was a pretty poor advertisement for European unity. Most of the European Union’s 27 member-states abstained, but five supported Serbia. They were Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. Each fears that Kosovo’s independence will reinforce separatist or autonomist tendencies in their own countries: Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus, ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, Basques in Spain. For these five countries, the integrity of the national territory is self-evidently a superior principle to a united EU foreign policy.

Interestingly, Bosnia-Herzegovina was absent from the UN vote and so did not even manage to cast an abstention. But no one knows better than EU officials on the ground in Bosnia that the handling of the Kosovo issue has made the Bosnian Serbs more difficult to deal with than ever.

Immediately after the UN vote, Macedonia and Montenegro dealt a blow to Serbia by recognising Kosovo’s independence. This prompted thousands of pro-Serbian demonstrators to take to the streets of Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital. Police fired tear gas. The consequences of recognition of Kosovo will be with the Balkans, and the EU, for many years to come.

Russia’s invasion and de facto partition of Georgia in August sparked uproar across Europe, or so it is said. In reality, many European Union countries were soon itching to restore relations with the Kremlin to normal as soon as was decently possible. And on a second issue critical to Europe’s security - the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina - many EU capitals have more in common with Moscow than is comfortable for them to admit.

Thirteen years after the US-brokered Dayton agreement ended the 1992-95 civil war, Bosnia is at peace but barely qualifies as a functioning state. Its two halves, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic, co-operate as little as possible. Its two main nationalities, the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs, are as alienated from each other as ever, a point illustrated by last weekend’s local elections across the country.

The EU’s influence in Bosnia has steadily declined, partly because the bloc has concentrated its regional efforts on Serbia and the Kosovo problem. “The political situation is Bosnia is even worse now than it was two years ago. Our ability to change it has been severely damaged,” says one EU policymaker.

This is where Russia comes in. Moscow, which for its own reasons tends to side with the Bosnian Serbs, is not eager to extend the mandate of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia. Under the 1995 Dayton accord, the OHR is the international authority responsible for overseeing Bosnian affairs.

The High Representative - at present, Miroslav Lajcak of Slovakia - doubles as the EU’s special representative in Bosnia. It is fair to say that, without the OHR, Bosnia would be even more unstable than it is now.

Unlike Moscow, Washington would like to see the OHR stay in place. The US sees Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader, as a troublemaker and it is anxious not to see Bosnia descend once more into disorder.

The EU’s 27 countries are divided. But some, such as France, Germany and Italy, think the OHR is a broken instrument beyond hope of repair. Instinctively, they are on the same side of the argument as Russia.

In a month’s time, everyone will have to show their hand at a meeting of the international Steering Board that supervises the Dayton accord. Is it conceivable that the EU will formulate a position that is aligned with Russia and against the US?

Probably not. The UK, and some former communist countries in central and eastern Europe, would surely not allow it. But the Bosnia problem is a reminder of how, even on its own doorstep, the EU finds it excruciatingly hard to run a common foreign policy.

The European Union can hardly contain its pleasure at the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the murderous Bosnian Serb leader who was picked up in Serbia on Monday after 11 years on the run. For all those who believe the best way to ensure long-term stability in former Yugoslavia is to accelerate Serbia’s path to EU membership, Karadzic’s arrest was cause for celebration. 

The arrest appears to vindicate the EU’s strategy over the past year of overtly supporting pro-EU political forces in Belgrade. The aim is twofold: to neutralise the militant nationalists who have poisoned Serbian public life for the past 20 years, and to persuade Serbian voters that their best hope of a decent future lies in aligning their country with the EU.

This strategy, so it is argued, helped secure victory in last February’s Serbian presidential election for Boris Tadic, the pro-EU incumbent. Likewise, the signing of an EU-Serbia pre-accession agreement in late April is said to have tipped the balance in favour of the pro-EU camp in Serbia’s parliamentary elections two weeks later.

The implementation of the pre-accession accord requires Serbia to be certified as being in full co-operation with the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Two war crimes suspects - Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime general, and Goran Hadzic, the Krajina Serb leader - are still fugitives. But Karadzic’s arrest is an undeniable breakthrough and deserves a reward. It is not impossible that Serbia will be declared an official candidate for EU membership before the end of this year or in 2009.

Before the celebrations get out of hand, however, we need to recall that Serbia faces formidable obstacles on its road to the EU. One is its readiness in terms of economic performance, the rule of law and its ability to meet a vast range of EU technical standards.

Another concerns Kosovo, whose secession from Serbia and declaration of independence in February has been recognised by most EU countries but is rejected even by the most pro-EU politicians in Belgrade. The Serbia-Kosovo dispute is very far from settled. The EU will think twice before repeating the mistake it made with Cyprus in 2004 and admitting a country in advance of a solution to its internal political and territorial quarrels.

Lastly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have stated flatly that further expansion of the EU is out of the question until the Lisbon treaty on institutional reform comes into effect. In other words, the door will be blocked to Serbia until Ireland reverses its rejection of the Lisbon treaty in last month’s referendum.

Putting pressure on an island in north-western Europe seems a curious way to go about promoting stability in south-eastern Europe. But perhaps for now we should just be happy that Karadzic is behind bars.

For weeks it has been an uncomfortable secret in Brussels that the European Union’s law and order mission in Kosovo is stuck in a political, diplomatic and legal morass. This initiative, announced with great fanfare last December, was supposed to show the EU at its best, shouldering responsibilities in a conflict-torn part of Europe where it did not exactly cover itself with glory in the 1990s.

Instead, officials now acknowledge that there is absolutely no chance that the EU will deploy its full complement of 1,900 policemen, judges, prosecutors and other administrators by mid-June, as originally planned. Why not? Because the authority to transfer police powers from the United Nations operation that is already in place in Kosovo to the new EU mission rests with the UN Security Council, where Russia has a veto.

Russia is no mood to help out the EU because it fundamentally disagrees with the decision of a majority of the EU’s 27 states to recognise Kosovo’s secession from Serbia in February. And the Kremlin has made it very plain to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that it expects him not to do the EU any favours on this score.

It looks highly unlikely there will be a quick solution to this problem. As a result, a de facto partition is taking hold between ethnic Serb-dominated northern Kosovo and the rest of the province, where ethnic Albanians are in an overwhelming majority. The EU’s nascent law and order mission has practically no influence over northern Kosovo, and there is little reason to think Serbia or Russia will let it develop any.

Perhaps the only glimmer of hope in all this was the May 11 Serbian election victory of the pro-EU political forces associated with President Boris Tadic. At present, however, it is unclear if Serbia’s next government will be formed by these forces or by a militant nationalist-socialist coalition. In any case, even Serbia’s pro-EU forces refuse to accept Kosovo’s secession. You can safely add Kosovo to your list of long-term troublespots on the EU’s periphery. 

Miroslav Lajcak of Slovakia is an amiable, gifted diplomat with the hardest job in town. As the international community’s high representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, he is tasked with turning this most unhappy and dysfunctional of states into a viable long-term entity. He is also supposed somehow to put Bosnia on an irreversible path to European Union membership. Neither goal looks remotely in sight.

When Lajcak met some reporters in Brussels this week, he was pressed to say what impact the Kosovo crisis would have on Bosnia. After all, the declaration of independence by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority in the teeth of opposition from Serbia would seem to provide the perfect justification for the ever restive Bosnian Serbs to announce that they want to secede from the state that boxes them together with Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.

Lajcak’s answer was rather disappointing. “Bosnia-Herzegovina is no hostage to Kosovo. It’s a country that knows exactly what are the tasks ahead and what it has to do to get on the European path… Kosovo does have an impact in terms of affecting the atmosphere in the region, but people shouldn’t use Kosovo as an excuse.”

The point is, of course, that “people” - that is, the Bosnian Serbs - do use Kosovo as an excuse. They refuse to accept the EU’s argument that Kosovo is a ’sui generis’ case that sets absolutely no precedent for other parts of the Balkans or the rest of the world. And in refusing to accept this argument, they are doing no more than the government of Lajcak’s own country, Slovakia, is doing when it refuses to recognise Kosovo’s independence. For Slovakia fears that independence for Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians sets a precedent for Slovakia’s ethnic Hungarian minority.

As it happens, the present Bosnian Serb leadership under Milorad Dodik seems disinclined to exploit the Kosovo crisis to cause trouble for Lajcak and cook up reckless secessionist plots. But neither he nor the majority of Bosnian Serbs feel any affection for the bizarre and unwieldy construction that is the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A crisis is never far round the corner in Bosnia.

Lajcak is the sixth high representative appointed to supervise Bosnia since the Dayton accords that ended the 1992-95 civil war. Kosovo’s declaration of independence, and the recognition of Kosovo by various western governments, have made it likely that even another six high representatives won’t make a success of Bosnia.